Internet communications applications such as, for example, e-mail, instant-messaging, telephony (voice over IP, or VoIP), or e-commerce require users to exchange contact information prior to initiating communication between one or more users. Exceptions to this include community-based or topic-oriented applications, such as newsgroups, chat boards, membership websites, or hobby websites, where communication among users may be controlled by the particular application. On the Internet, users who do not know one another, but who may have reason to communicate, may be limited by two main factors: 1) the availability of contact information for those with whom they wish to communicate; and 2) the capabilities of an application (e.g., a website), such as whether the provider permits communication among users utilizing the application. For example, users visiting the same web page may have at least a common interest in the content of that page, yet they normally have no way of discovering this, nor do they have means for communicating with other users. To identify and/or communicate with users having similar interests, a user must know such persons in advance or rely on a facility provided by the application (i.e., the website).
While users may share links or start a conversation through emails, email is not an optimal mechanism for such activities. Instead, social networks may change the way users communicate with one another by providing a better mechanism for users to easily share information and engage in a conversation with other users.
A Social Network may refer to a community of members, participants, users or other individuals that share similar values or interests. Each member is typically associated with a personal profile, which may contain demographics, psychographics or professional information relating to the user. Each member may have from zero to many connections or relationships with other members within the social network. Each member may engage in activities, such as email communications, information sharing, etc., with other members. These individuals may grow the social network community by inviting others to join/connect to their community. A social network may also include individuals who engage in some common real-time activities online and share some common context. This includes, but is not limit to, shopping at the same online e-merchant website, browsing the same or related content pages, engaging in an online event or activities at the same time. A social network may extend to activities and individuals engaging in activities around a web page or an object referred to by such a web page. As used herein, the term “users” may include members, guest members, and others accessing a social network, and the term “social” is used in broadest sense to refer to communities of interest.
A social networking service is an electronic or otherwise online/network based service that provides a platform for, or otherwise facilitates, creating and/or building social networks and/or relationships among people who share interests. Social networking services may facility one or more social networks, i.e. non-overlapping groups of interconnected users. A user of a typical social network service may be able to create a profile that lists, for example, information about the user as well as social links (e.g., friends of the user). For example, the user may post ideas, activities, events, interests, and contact information on their user profile. The user may be able to upload pictures to their profile, post blog entries, search for other users, and/or store a list of contacts.
The social networking service may include applications which implement forums, where the user may communicate with other users. The user may be able to create and/or subscribe to groups that share common interests or affiliations, and the user may be able to send or receive comments and other content to or from the other group members. The social networking service may provide controls that allow the user to determine which other users may view the user profile or contact the user, and to which users profile changes or updates are reported or pushed.
Facebook is an example of a widely used social networking service. A Facebook user creates a profile for other users to view. The user may add other users as friends, and these friends may be automatically notified when the user updates his or her profile. For example, the friends of the user may be notified when, for example, the user uploads new pictures or changes his or her status to “at work.” The Facebook user may set one or more parts of the profile to “public” (e.g., all Facebook user may view the one or more parts of the profile), and may set parts of the profile to “private” (e.g., only friends may view the one or more parts of the profile).
Twitter is another example of a widely used social networking service. A Twitter user may send and receive text-based posts of up to 140 characters, known as “tweets.” The user may subscribe to other users' tweets, and other users may subscribe to the user's tweets (e.g., followers). Tweets are public by default, but the user may restrict messages to be private such that only followers of the user may see the tweet. Due to the content limit (e.g., up to 140 characters), tweets may direct followers to content-hosting services such as, for example, Twitpic to accommodate multimedia content and text longer than 140 characters.
Social network services are, generally speaking, content aggregation and distribution systems which aggregate content items continuously supplied by each user, and other sources, into content storage associated with that user, e.g. a profile web page, twitter stream, etc., and redistribute those content items, by selectively allowing access to each user's content storage, to selected overlapping or non-overlapping subsets of other participants based on dynamic and/or static permissions, privacy settings, profile attributes, etc. set by each user which define what content items, or types of content, that user wishes to see of other users and/or what of their own content items or types they wish to allow other selected users to see. The permissions/settings/attributes of all of the users form a matrix of cross-permissions which effectively defines what content items and/or users each user “sees” or is able to discover, e.g. that user's “universe”, when they access the system. The social network system continuously resolves these cross permissions as content items are received so as to properly redistribute, i.e. push and/or respond to requests/queries for access to, those items. As participants connect to the system to receive updates on a an ad hoc basis, content items may be stored up and delivered in batch upon the connection/request of a participant. Content discovery/search must also be facilitated to allow participants to search/discover content items or sources/categories thereof, that the source thereof has suitably permissioned, and modify their permissions so as to obtain prior content items and/or receive distributions of new content from those sources.
The primary feature that is common among most social network services is the user profile. Users typically establish an account with the social networking service by providing a name and other identifying information, and before any action may be taken in connection with the user profile, the user logs in to the account by supplying an account identifier and a password. The profile may include biographic data such as birthday, gender, current location, schools attended, employment experiences, and personal relationships for searching and viewing by other users. Further information that may provide an even more detailed picture of the profile owner and his personality may be added, such as religious affiliation, personal philosophies, tastes in music, literature, cinema, television, athletic teams, and so on.
Links to other users or contacts may be formally established and publicized on a user's profile as well, which may then permit direct communications via e-mail like messages between the user and the contacts. In some systems, real-time chat with concurrently online contacts may also be possible. Access to the profile information may be restricted based upon the level of affiliation to its owner. For example, contacts having a direct “friendship” link to a given user may be able to view the complete profile information thereof, while those having only a secondary affiliation (friend of a friend) may be able to view only the basic biographic information. The establishment of a friendship “network” is understood to facilitate new users to the social network to establish their own direct links to common friends and, thereby, access to the content of those profiles.
Specific user-to-user communications is a significant aspect of most social networking services, but another feature which perhaps eclipses this is the broadcasting of information to everyone within the user's circle of contacts. Specific names and implementations may vary, with some social networking services referring to this feature as a “wall,” while others refer to this feature as “comments,” “tweets,” or others. Regardless of the terminology employed, the feature is essentially the same—a variety of content can be posted by the profile owner or by the profile owner's contacts for viewing by those within the user's network of friends. This content may include text messages, Uniform Resource Locator (URLS) including links to other webpages, photographs, and videos. With the proliferation of GPS (Global Positioning Satellite)-enabled mobile devices with Internet access capabilities, location coordinate data may also be posted. There may be enhancements to the display of the foregoing data, such as showing the location on a map overlaid on the rendered page, or a preview of the webpage for a link.
Unfortunately, users with varying interests often have a difficult time locating each other within such social networking systems as it necessitates first identifying and establishing a link with another user or a social network of users to which they belong, which may require “knowing” another user who “knows” of a user of interest and/or reliance upon the ability to search and discover information made public by a user which identifies their interests, if any. Additionally, many steps and a significant amount of time may be required prior to commencing the actual interaction, e.g. that user may have to “accept” a request to be connected.
Creating communities of people with similar interests may also suffer drawbacks and difficulties. It may be time consuming and difficult to create a community of interest for users that permits interaction. Communities of interest may be difficult to create, especially for neophyte computer users with little experience in the field. If separate software, applets, or plugins are needed to access the community, it may be difficult to convince prospective community members to find a copy of or go to the website location for downloading the necessary software, download the software, install and configure it, and use the software to communicate with the community. Additionally, it may be difficult to publicize the existence of such a community to others.
Generally, in existing social networking services, the user profile based access permission premise may make it difficult for users to discover and expand their interconnections with other users having similar interests.